As a schoolboy at Satara, B.R. Ambedkar and his siblings were forbidden to touch the common water tap or drinking vessel because they were untouchable; they stayed thirsty unless a caste-Hindu peon chose to pour water from a height into their cupped hands, and on days he was absent they went without. Access to a basic bodily need was made contingent on the goodwill of a person higher in the caste order.
The book interleaves Ambedkar's early-twentieth-century experiences with dated contemporary newspaper reports of Dalits beaten, denied water, or killed for similar transgressions, arguing that caste atrocity is not a historical residue but an ongoing structure. The parallel incidents are presented as evidence that legal abolition did not end the practice.
Caste untouchability operates through control of physical space and movement: who may enter a classroom, draw from a well, walk on a road, or sit on a seat marks and reproduces status. Exclusion from shared space, rather than explicit law, is the everyday mechanism that keeps the hierarchy operative.
Rendered in Gond art, the book refuses rectangular panels and jail-like borders, letting images and narrative flow in organic, interconnected shapes to resist the confinement it depicts. Choosing an indigenous visual grammar over the conventional Western comic frame makes the form itself an argument against boxing lives into fixed categories.